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...they could not analyze for carbon, nor knew about its critical role;
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I think we have to be careful here: yes, they did not have a scientific understanding of carbon and it's specific role in how steel behaved in the quench. However, they had generations of empirical knowledege that said things like 'steel that looks like this, behaves like so;' to such a degree that when metallurgy and metallography became the way to understand steel they were checking the new theories against the eyeballing of fracture surfaces by the old foundry guys. They could give you the carbon content down to tenths of a percent or better just by looking at a quenched and broken surface. All that knowledge dissappeared in the last hundred years, but I think it's safe to assume it went back a thousand or more, and they had a good idea of how to treat the hypo- and hyper-eutectoid steels as they came from the furnace, if not precisely why.
